Oh boy, but do they have plenty of other choices for Other... maybe with the exception of the Baltics. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
For Poland, this is Partitions, and two out of three empires participating are now inside the EU together with them. And they actually escaped East to the West... so using Germans as the Other would be very problematic.
Many Czechs actually believe that the best things they got as a nation were brought in by Germans. Again, hard to use them as the Other. And on and on I could go...
If you want to, try reading Uses of the Other by Iver Neumann (it's extremely theoretical, be careful).
Yet, it was used regularly by the parties in the previous Polish government and the media associated with them [including, what a cynical hypocrisy, a tabloid owned by Axel Springer Verlag]. Polish Euroscepticism is in no small part Germanophobia. On this insane Right, there is substantial anti-semitism, too.
Many Czechs actually believe that the best things they got as a nation were brought in by Germans.
But, there is also the issue of the Sudeten Germans (throwing them out was a very concrete act of nation building, but so was the mythology of resistant Czechs and colaborating Sudeten-Germans built to support it 'morally'), the issue of on-going conflict with refugee organisations and Bavaria and Austria ('foreign meddling'), the Temelín conflict with Austria (which, the way I read it, was seen in the Czech Republic as one about Austria trying to lord over Czechs, too), and German multinationals buying up national symbol companies. In addition, for The Other, there are Gypsies... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
And of course, using gypsies as the official Other is non-PC. It still happens, but gets rarer and rarer.
